Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Robin's Egg Nest, how to make a "Bird Nest" Pendant

Hi again everyone! As mentioned in my last post, I was working at Gem Shows the past two weekends. During the show in Tucson, two of my customers wore these necklaces where the pendants looked like bird nests and I thought they were the cutest thing! So of course right then and there, I grabbed some wire and decided to replicate the same thing from memory. We had natural turquoise beads at our booth, so that was my natural choice of material. I used 7mm rounds in natural Hubei turquoise which is about $18 per 16" strand wholesale. But, you can get 7mm blue rounds made out of resin, glass or even plastic for about $1 per 16" strand. You should find them on Etsy or Ebay, that's all they should cost, so do not pay more!!! For the wire, I used the base-metal 24 gauge again (like in my first blog post on button rings).

Start out with about a yard of wire and string it through the beads. Then bend it into a triangle, and wrap triangle as many times as you'd like. When both ends of the wire has about 6 inches left, wrap one though one side of the triangle to secure the nest, and this side will be the top of the pendant.

Use the other end of the wire to wrap but the other two sides. The wire from the first side you wrapped will become the bail/loop for the pendant. So create two large loops with that wire and twist it 180 degrees with pliers. Once the twist creates that bails, it's pretty done, the excess wire can be wrapped around the bail, snipped off, or behind the nest to create the "back of the nest."

The best part about making these is that NEATNESS DOES NOT COUNT! I did a general search of "bird nest" on Etsy and saw hundreds of different versions of them, and I actually think the messier the better! lol. I don't know why I wasted all the effort to keep it neat, I probably just over-analyzed it as I do with everything in life...lol. I wanted to re-do this messier before posting but decided it's better to showcase both ends of the spectrum. If you have any questions, please ask or comment! Until next time :-)